Dear Friends,
The young often feel alone, feel that the world they face is without precedent. I often think that they, and not only they, would find comfort in the poets of the 1890s. These poets were menaced by evil, but were able to glimpse what is good.
This week, it’s my joy to annotate a poem by Francis Thompson (1859 — 1907). The Mistress of Vision is about poetic vision, Divine Wisdom, and the meaning of our suffering.
THE MISTRESS OF VISION.
I
Secret was the garden;
Set i’ the pathless awe
Where no star its breath can draw.
Life, that is its warden,
Sits behind the fosse of death. Mine eyes saw not, and I saw.
Life is found “behind the fosse of death”, on the other side of the moat, that deep ditch, filled with water, which rings a castle. She is seen, not by the eyes of the flesh, but those of the spirit. To find Her, we must cross the moat, must die — must let go of the false self which thinks “I am the doer; I want this; I want that”.
II
It was a mazeful wonder;
Thrice three times it was enwalled
With an emerald—
Sealèd so asunder.
All its birds in middle air hung a-dream, their music thralled.
This garden brings amazement. It is secret, sealed, protected by nine walls — the heart unattached to things of this world, that heart which looks only to God.
III
The Lady of fair weeping,
At the garden’s core,
Sang a song of sweet and sore
And the after-sleeping;
In the land of Luthany, and the tracts of Elenore.
At the core of the garden is the Lady who is Life. She sings of sweetness and pain, and of “the after-sleeping”, that which is beyond death.
IV
With sweet-panged singing,
Sang she through a dream-night’s day;
That the bowers might stay,
Birds bate their winging,
Nor the wall of emerald float in wreathèd haze away.
The garden is sustained by her singing…
V
The lily kept its gleaming,
In her tears (divine conservers!)
Washèd with sad art;
And the flowers of dreaming
Palèd not their fervours,
For her blood flowed through their nervures;
And the roses were most red, for she dipt them in her heart.
…by her tears, by her blood…
VI
There was never moon,
Save the white sufficing woman:
Light most heavenly-human—
Like the unseen form of sound,
Sensed invisibly in tune,—
With a sun-derivèd stole
Did inaureole
All her lovely body round;
Lovelily her lucid body with that light was interstrewn.
…by her light, derived from the sun (like the moon, she reflects a higher light).
VII
The sun which lit that garden wholly,
Low and vibrant visible,
Tempered glory woke;
And it seemèd solely
Like a silver thurible
Solemnly swung, slowly,
Fuming clouds of golden fire, for a cloud of incense-smoke.
This light is like the “golden fire” of burning incense, swung to and fro in the thurible at Mass.
VIII
But woe’s me, and woe’s me,
For the secrets of her eyes!
In my visions fearfully
They are ever shown to be
As fringèd pools, whereof each lies
Pallid-dark beneath the skies
Of a night that is
But one blear necropolis.
And her eyes a little tremble, in the wind of her own sighs.
Her eyes are sad, like pools in which a dark sky is mirrored, a sky like a city of death.
IX
Many changes rise on
Their phantasmal mysteries.
They grow to an horizon
Where earth and heaven meet;
And like a wing that dies on
The vague twilight-verges,
Many a sinking dream doth fleet
Lessening down their secrecies.
And, as dusk with day converges,
Their orbs are troublously
Over-gloomed and over-glowed with hope and fear of things to be.
Her eyes are like the sky just before dawn; the old dreams are sinking, lessening in strength, while the new has not yet risen.
X
There is a peak on Himalay,
And on the peak undeluged snow,
And on the snow not eagles stray;
There if your strong feet could go,—
Looking over tow’rd Cathay
From the never-deluged snow—
Farthest ken might not survey
Where the peoples underground dwell whom antique fables know.
The poet has heard of Agartha, that country long sunk beneath the surface of the earth, where wisdom has been preserved. The first mention of Agartha in the West was by the Marquis d’Alveydre in his book “Mission de l’Inde en Europe” (1886).
XI
East, ah, east of Himalay,
Dwell the nations underground;
Hiding from the shock of Day,
For the sun’s uprising-sound:
Dare not issue from the ground
At the tumults of the Day,
So fearfully the sun doth sound
Clanging up beyond Cathay;
For the great earthquaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay.
In this telling, the inhabitants of Agartha are underground for protection from the Dawn, from the clangor of God’s great Beginning.
XII
Lend me, O lend me
The terrors of that sound,
That its music may attend me.
Wrap my chant in thunders round;
While I tell the ancient secrets in that Lady’s singing found.
The poet wishes to borrow the music of the Dawn in order to tell the secrets in the Lady’s singing.
XIII
On Ararat there grew a vine,
When Asia from her bathing rose;
Our first sailor made a twine
Thereof for his prefiguring brows.
Canst divine
Where, upon our dusty earth, of that vine a cluster grows?
When Asia emerged from the Flood, and the Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, Noah planted grapes. Twining grapevines around his brows, he anticipated the Crown of Thorns worn by our Lord at His crucifixion:
XIV
On Golgotha there grew a thorn
Round the long-prefigured Brows.
Mourn, O mourn!
For the vine have we the spine? Is this all the Heaven allows?
“I am the true vine”, says our Lord; is this vine only thorns? only a source of torment?
XV
On Calvary was shook a spear;
Press the point into thy heart—
Joy and fear!
All the spines upon the thorn into curling tendrils start.
When our heart is pierced by a spear — as was the heart of our Lord — the vine begins to live.
XVI
O, dismay!
I, a wingless mortal, sporting
With the tresses of the sun?
I, that dare my hand to lay
On the thunder in its snorting?
Ere begun,
Falls my singed song down the sky, even the old Icarian way.
The poet sees that his task is too great; should he, “a wingless mortal”, dare to play with the hair, the golden hair of the sun? Like Icarus, who flew with borrowed wings attached by wax, his song falls to earth.
XVII
From the fall precipitant
These dim snatches of her chant
Only have remainèd mine;—
That from spear and thorn alone
May be grown
For the front of saint or singer any divinizing twine.
Nonetheless, he has been able to save “snatches” of the Lady’s chant, snatches of great value. The Lady sings that any crown which may adorn the brow of saint or singer, any growth beyond the human into divinity, must come from pain, from “spear and thorn”.
XVIII
Her song said that no springing
Paradise but evermore
Hangeth on a singing
That has chords of weeping,
And that sings the after-sleeping
To souls which wake too sore.
‘But woe the singer, woe!’ she said; ‘beyond the dead his singing-lore,
All its art of sweet and sore,
He learns, in Elenore!’
The lovely growth of the garden depends on “a singing that has chords of weeping”. As Rilke writes in the Elegies, the source of joy is in the land of Lamentation. The poet must learn his singing-lore in a land beyond the dead.
XIX
Where is the land of Luthany,
Where is the tract of Elenore?
I am bound therefor.
And now, the crucial words:
XX
‘Pierce thy heart to find the key;
With thee take
Only what none else would keep;
Learn to dream when thou dost wake,
Learn to wake when thou dost sleep.
Learn to water joy with tears,
Learn from fears to vanquish fears;
To hope, for thou dar’st not despair,
Exult, for that thou dar’st not grieve;
Plough thou the rock until it bear;
Know, for thou else couldst not believe;
Lose, that the lost thou may’st receive;
Die, for none other way canst live.
When earth and heaven lay down their veil,
And that apocalypse turns thee pale;
When thy seeing blindeth thee
To what thy fellow-mortals see;
When their sight to thee is sightless;
Their living, death; their light, most lightless;
Search no more—
Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore.’
XXI
Where is the land of Luthany,
And where the region Elenore?
I do faint therefor.
‘When to the new eyes of thee
All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly
To each other linkèd are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star;
When thy song is shield and mirror
To the fair snake-curlèd Pain,
Where thou dar’st affront her terror
That on her thou may’st attain
Persean conquest; seek no more,
O seek no more!
Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore.’
The poet passes through the gates when he sees all things are linked, when he sees that flower and star, earth and heaven, are connected. “As Above, so Below”: in moving a flower, I trouble a star.
As Perseus conquered Medusa, the poet conquers Pain; that hair, a nest of snakes, that glance which turns to stone all who meet it, when seen in the mirror of song may be mastered.
XXII
So sang she, so wept she,
Through a dream-night’s day;
And with her magic singing kept she—
Mystical in music—
That garden of enchanting
In visionary May;
Swayless for my spirit’s haunting,
Thrice-threefold walled with emerald from our mortal mornings grey.
The poet, who has known many a grey mortal morning, knows that this garden is inviolable; it will not succumb to Winter.
XXIII
And as a necromancer
Raises from the rose-ash
The ghost of the rose;
My heart so made answer
To her voice’s silver plash,—
Stirred in reddening flash,
And from out its mortal ruins the purpureal phantom blows.
The poet’s dead heart lives again.
XXIV
Her tears made dulcet fretting,
Her voice had no word,
More than thunder or the bird.
Yet, unforgetting,
The ravished soul her meanings knew. Mine ears heard not, and I heard.
The ravished soul of the poet hears not with ears of the flesh. But he hears.
XXV
When she shall unwind
All those wiles she wound about me,
Tears shall break from out me,
That I cannot find
Music in the holy poets to my wistful want, I doubt me!
When the vision has departed, when the “wiles” the Lady has wound around him are unwound, how shall the poet face those grey mornings? The song he longs for, he may not find in the works of the holy poets…
In Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound tells of advice given him:
The "Nineties" tried your game
And died, there's nothing in it.
Nothing… in the eyes of the world!
Thank you so much.
With every good wish,
Ishmael
In Castalia, I offer poetry and song. For a few weeks, the song will be paused; it should resume in August.
I offer online lessons in music theory; for a taste of the insights to which it may lead, please see my website:
Francis Thompson at the age of 19